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Vevo nears deal with Warner Music

The music labels are turning up the heat on YouTube again.

Vevo, the Web’s No. 4 video destination — behind Google’s YouTube, Facebook and Yahoo — is about to sign Warner Music content to its service, The Post has learned.

A deal would break a seven-year deadlock between Vevo, owned by the two largest music labels — Universal and Sony — and the No. 3 label, which back in 2009 spurned an offer to join the just-formed site in favor of doing its own thing.

Vevo Chief Executive Erik Huggers hopes having artists from all three large labels on his site will increase traffic and steal some business from YouTube.

Huggers has been on the job for a year and has made it his mission to sign Warner. He has petitioned Warner’s owner, Len Blavatnik, on a near nonstop basis.

The parties are in final negotiations over a deal that will make a host of Warner Music artists — Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran Led Zeppelin, Coldplay and many others — available at vevo.com for 12 months to 18 months, sources said.

“[Bagging Warner] creates a destination for all the videos from all the majors that doesn’t really exist [outside of YouTube],” a source close to the talks said. “In terms of trying it and seeing if it helps, it’s going to be a really interesting experiment.”

After the expected Warner Music deal is signed, Huggers will likely focus his attention on creating a paid subscription service.

In its fight with YouTube, Vevo from its beginnings in 2009 was handicapped due to its lack of the industry’s No. 3 label — Warner’s owner at the time, Edgar Bronfman Jr., decided to partner with MTV instead.

Later, Warner Music’s content was syndicated around the Web.

Universal, Sony and Warner all want to win better deals for their artists than YouTube currently offers. Plus, they want YouTube to better police copyright infringers.

YouTube, which splits music video ad revenue with the label, argues it has been a huge economic engine for the music business and that its technology, Content ID, weeds almost all of the copyrighted material from the site.

Vevo had no comment on any possible Warner deal.